Path of a Monk: Another Path
by Monkeybandit2
Summary: When the wind blows, which direction does it go? Or better yet where does the leaf, trapped by the wind, flutter to? (Retelling of Path of a Monk, AU of an AU if you containing one less roster of characters)
1. Chapter 1

**This story is meant for entertainment purposes, I otherwise would not put a disclaimer here for Naruto and Warcraft... (Sniffs) I kind of wish I owned the latter though.**

**Details as to the reasoning behind this story is located at the bottom.**

Path of a monk: Another path

Chapter 1: To tell a beginning...

Unknown beach

"Bleh! Pfft!"

A drenched boy in waterlogged street urchin clothes spat out sand that became lodged in his mouth when he woke up with a start. He summoned up all the spit he could muster to flush out the grainy menace in his mouth and expelled what he could, but the taste as well as the grains of sand were persistently stuck to various locations of his mouth. With the dull roar of a collapsing wave, his attention on his current discomfort was momentarily forgotten in favor of observing his surroundings.

A dense jungle to his front, a non-descriptive beach all around him, and the sea behind his prone form. How did he get here? Where was here? Those questions as well as several others ran through the boy's mind... until the familiar taste of his predicament reared its ugly head.

"Pffth!"

He spat out another dirty wad of saliva and crawled towards the ocean. Cupping his hands together, he dove them into a oncoming splash of a diminutive wave lapping the shore and brought the salt water to his lips as a improvised mouthwash. For a brief moment, he actually considered which tasted worse, the sand or salt water from the sea? Both were expelled with partial prejudice.

Retreating back to the more dry portion of the beach, he sat down, lied down and stared up at the sky as he tried to trace his steps to how he ended up to... wherever 'here' was.

He ran a hair through his dirtied blackened hair. He grimaced as he literally felt the grime that coated his hair to a different hair color. A reminder of where he had been...

Konoha, shinobi village of the Land of Fire. Home of heroes... and bigotry en masse. He never knew why they hated them, and why it was more or less a accepted part of life for most of them. Save for a couple of faces to break the mold, he would not hesitate to say the village was intolerant of him. For reasons unknown, to him at least, they only reserve hatred for him where a complete stranger was welcomed with open arms. A fact he spied on multiple times from the corners of buildings and the shadows of the urban jungle.

Every now and then, and especially around his birthday, he would be chased through the formerly quiet streets. He grinned a little. The last time very well looked like that, the very last time he would endure that.

He managed to get two blocks ahead through the mentally mapped out twists and turns that served him well ever since he could remember when he dove into a barrel. He grabbed the lid of it and sealed himself in it as tight as he could. A fact he would've regretted later if he hadn't found the contents inside was apples.

He snickered as he heard the horde of people pass by being none the wiser to his hiding spot. But unfortunately he found that he locked himself inside the barrel when he tried to escape. Before he could cry, complain, or anything to indicate distress, he heard another set of voices approaching the barrel.

He panicked as he thought that the mob returned for him upon learning of his deception. He palmed the walls of the barrel in fear when the barrel was hoisted with audible grunts and complaints about the barrel being heavy, but what confused him was the fact that they continued to trek across the unseen world instead of checking its contents. Was it not the mob chasing him?

Whatever the case was, they settled the barrel on something mobile, a cart perhaps judging from the indication of smooth movement with the occasional stop.

He knew not how long he had been inside the barrel, just that the cart never seemed to stop for long periods of time save for once or twice. Then the voices came back and he, or rather the barrel, was carried off to something much larger than the cart. Whatever it was, there was a near constant dull roar that dully filtered through the barrel's wooden barrier in a matter of hours later. Until recently , or what at least what he remembered last, the tempo that was the norm changed without warning. Being in a storm wasn't a new experience for him. Being tossed around with a mix of devoured apples and whole apples was new however.

Now he was here. Staring up at a cloudless sky with the ocean gently reminding him it was there. The repetition of the waves was interrupted as another familiar sound and feeling made itself known.

The growl of a hungering stomach.

With a grunt, he seated himself upright with half hearted hopes that maybe some of the apples that he journeyed with. No such luck.

He grimaced once again as he looked behind him at the shadowy jungle behind him. Centuries of human instinct told him to stay away, it was a place of danger, he was safe where he was. But at the same time, it told him that if he was to find an ample chance, he needed to brave its depths... hypocrite.

Another growl of his stomach was the push needed to get himself up.

XVX

Unknown jungle

The kid kept looking over his shoulder at the mixture of bright and dark atmosphere that resided in the jungle as he devoured what might have been a pear. Overall he hadn't encountered anything more vicious than a mosquito and had no reason to be wary, be he had been wrong before. It was a rather twisted truth to those who have not walked his walk in life- fear was the greatest wisdom one can have. It may not lead to happiness, but it kept one alive when the environment was less than hospitable. He was especially not going to drop his guard now when he had no idea what awaited to be discovered.

_Snap!_

He may not know what Murphy's law was, but he was cursing it the moment he came face to face with a weird monkey-like creature armed with a snarl, and a makeshift club.

He bolted with a howling primate after him on all fours trying to catch up to the boy. Unfortunately for the child, Murphy's law was in full effect when the monkey's family members came in shrieking and armed with other crude weaponry.

If he was in Konoha he would've lost the monkey-things during the first ten minutes of their chase. But between the unfamiliar setting, their seemingly unnatural endurance, and the fact that he was running in a relatively straight line screaming like a loon, nothing was going in his favor.

He turned at a corner of a ruin that came seemingly out of nowhere in the thick jungle, a move that cost his determined pursuers half their group when they failed to account for the sudden change. The kid looked back and guffawed slightly at the pile up of ornery primates despite still being pursued by the remaining portion.

When he brought his attention back to his current course, his face was intimately greeted by... a jug?

Before he even knew it, the dirty haired child landed on his back with full force as his world went black.

XVX

Unidentified Hut

Blue eyes creaked open to a window pouring forth sun light hovering above his blanket covered legs. He blinked. A blanket?

Both of his hands gripped the apparent mattress beneath him. He was in a bed alright. He gave his surroundings a look. It was spartan in its furnishings, but clean and dry. Everything inside the home was fairly large, as if to accommodate a fairly large man, or woman... it was certainly the size meant for that one set of people who made themselves larger through the use of hand signs. Regardless, even the bed he was on was probably meant for whoever lived here.

The sound of dirt being shifted and leaves rustled were emanating from the most obvious portal into the home. Curiosity got the better of the child, and he crawled up to the window.

What he saw was... unusual for the kid. At first he thought it was a man hunched over something with his back to the kid, but the only bits of 'skin' that could be seen on the 'man', namely his shoulders and the back of his hat covered head, was covered in what appeared to be black fur.

The kid would've said it was some kind of animal if it wasn't for the fact the creature was adorned in the clothes of a farmer, and from what he could hear coming from the creature, a song being mumbled to itself.

With a heaving grunt, the creature grabs its own knee and stood up to its full height. It took off its hat to reveal short round black ears as it wiped a hand on its brow. It turned and faced the kid and did a double take as the kid gawked...

A gust of wind blew past between the kid and the apparent black and white bear-man with a braided string of hair running down from his chin.

_Silence_ was all that ensued between them.

In what seemed like ages, the bear-man slowly waved at the child, unsure of what to do really. It was a mirrored situation and action for the boy peering out of the window.

The boy blinked, hard.

In the back of his mind, he knew the story of his own life, of Naruto Uzumaki, had taken a much odder turn.

**A/N: For those of you who are wondering as to why I'm essentially reposting this story in another name (however debatable it is), here is my reasoning: I'm not willing to read another review of how someone dislikes the fact I had (partial spoiler) added a number of characters from Bleach into the story (conformed, not from another universe). So in essence this story is for those people and to hopefully deter any further reviews showcasing their dislike for it.**

**It was either this or delete the original which I have ****_NO_****_INTENTION_**** of doing; I intend to write the original the way I want to.**

**For the readers of the original who have taken an interest in this story I would like to warn you with the following quote I had read in a game:**

**"I can say without a doubt that there are an infinite number of universes.**

**Some are just like our own... but for one or two significant events, exactly the same."**

**-Lex Luthor**

**Again, you have been warned.**

**Monkeybandit2, making off with your attention! No refunds.**


	2. Chapter 2

**This story is meant for entertainment purposes, I otherwise would not put a disclaimer here for Naruto and Warcraft... (Sniffs) I kind of wish I owned the latter though. For added protection, I also add Bleach though it is in name but actual character only. I own not those three.**

**For the sake of this chapter, please assume the use of quotation marks (' ') around a certain word or two are words that are not understood in Naruto's point of view in a conversation.**

Path of a monk: Another path

Chapter 2: To tell a path

Jade Temple Grounds, three weeks later

Life can take many a unexpected turn for anyone from babe, to peasant, to a monarch. Monks, scholars, and aspiring Brewmasters were no different.

Much to anyone's shock an outsider had managed, albeit unintentionally, to enter Pandaria from the outside world. From what they were able to gather, he was a stowaway on a ship from a faraway, unknown land because he accidentally became trapped inside a barrel that was part of that ship's cargo, and that was only a recent breakthrough. Ever since a local farmer, Xi Shou, came back from his latest trip into the surrounding forests to improve his fledgling skills as a Brewmaster with a boy of the human race, as defined by the more adventurous of the Pandaren that left and returned to Pandaria on similar but far less drastic terms of the boy's arrival by right of knowledge and experience (i.e. they didn't wash up on the shore), the boy known as Naruto Uzumaki became a topic of interest throughout the region.

As for the reason why learning from the boy was going so slow, culture shock plain and simple. At least it was summed up as so from arriving to a strange land, meeting a different culture, and not to mention a new race of beings altogether that speak a entirely different set of languages. What was most curious to the people of Pandaria however, aside from the boy drifting to shore, was that Naruto Uzumaki neither spoke nor understood Common, the prime language of human race brought back to the mist enshrouded island by successful (i.e. living) world wise Brewmasters. He spoke not Dwarvern, Gnomish, Tuar-ahe, Troll, Gutterspeak, Thalassian, Goblin, Orcish, or Darnassian for the sake of being thorough when Common failed, Pandaren was already long crossed out before they tried to learn from the boy through the use of every language brought to Pandaria.

This boy spoke another language entirely, even though not masterfully from what the naked eye could tell; either because of his youth or the people he hailed from lacked a word for it had yet to be determined, not that they could understand him however. Thus the three weeks of slowly teaching and learning from the boy. At least there was some level of communication, albeit a cracked one.

XVX

"So... Pandaren... not... fight?" Asked a confused Naruto as he helped sweep up the stone path of one of the gates while observing a regiment of monks and members from other walks of life performed strikes, poses, and occasionally spared with one another while the blond himself was alongside a graying old Pandaren man, Liu Young. "We... fight... only... to... 'defend,'" answered the ageing bear man slowly. As he and everyone else at the temple came to learn, Naruto was still learning how to speak and read the language Pandaren, thus the need to speak slowly to avoid confusion.

"'Defend?'" The boy asked. Liu stopped sweeping and picked up a fallen stick before reaching over to tug at Naruto's broom to seize the boy's attention. He watched on in bewilderment when Liu mock fought against him with the stick while keeping control of the boy's broom. Every time he 'attacked,' Naruto 'blocked.' A crude method, but the point was driven across to the blond haired boy. Liu flung the stick through the gate and returned to the chore at hand, unaware of the distracted gaze of Naruto on the Panderan monks nearby.

XVX

Meanwhile, inside the temple

Heads were shaking, mumbles were uttered, and the occasional voice was raised. Masters, elders, and scholars alike were gathered in the room of the Scrying Pool. While some were content with letting time takes its course, some were not in regards of Naruto Uzumaki. It was not out of malice or disrespect on their part, but a lack of patience to hear the end of a story, a story to which brought attention to everyone in the room at this moment.

Wise Mari, local Jinyu and keeper of the Scrying Pool, was convinced by a scholar wishing to know more about Naruto's land for the concept of another land unknown by many was far too tempting to ignore let alone make some kind of effort to put pen to paper about it. With him he brought the discarded ragged shirt Naruto first worn when he arrived, newer and fresher clothes were easily superior to the rags even if they were bare threads. The idea was simple, much like a past is carried by a person so too are they carried by objects; to an archeologist any object holds a history to tell tale of how a culture lived and breathed, to a mystic a more intimate tale was told.

Years of collected blood, sweat, tears from the eyes, tears from use, and hand sewn patch marks attached to the fabric wove a more interesting tale. The body was a honest being no matter the schooling: muscle built up when one worked or exercised often. Organs shut down from illness, age, or habits the body can no longer repel. Skin, or in some cases fur, grew lighter or darker from the sun depending on the season and how often one ventured outside. Blood, in a mystic's hands, can tell the story of one's life when in sufficient supply and was utilized correctly.

The scholar was joined in by a master of the martial arts, followed by another scholar... and a set of elders...

One by one, group by group, every curious member of the temple came to the Scrying Pool. Now the uncertain fate of Naruto Uzumaki was being called to order in the improvised meeting chamber by the opening of the temple door behind the pools.

Emerging from the shadows of the corridor was a pandaren bearing the standardize outfit of his order, the Shado-Pan, with nothing but a pauldron of a snarling tiger on his right shoulder, a scarf keeping the lower portion of his face a secret, and a kasa with a pair of horns decorating the very top of it. In his company were only two pandaren of his order, their heads shrouded in a head consuming cloth that revealed nothing but their eyes and seemingly ornamental headguard.

"Lord Taran Zhu," one pandaren respectively murmured in a bow, followed quickly by another and another till an essential wave of both motion and sound greeted the unfazed pandaren as he respectfully approached the pools and viewed the scenes granted by the mystic waters.

"My lord," a scholarly pandaren, a pandaren woman in white robes with a green trim, uttered in reverence as she approached him while she bowed. "I'm sorry that we have called you away from your duties but I'm afraid we are at a deadlock as to how to resolve this."

The Shado-Master turned to face her for but a brief moment before turning his attention back to the pool before him, focusing a great deal of his attention into the image of a great fox of nine tails rampaging through buildings and the wilderness alike with no distinction between the two amongst other things. "Even if a decision was made before my arrival, the Shado-Pan would be involved no matter the case," he gruffly replied.

With but the barest traces of embarrassment coursing through her, the scholar bowed in recognition of his reply and awaited whatever was to come, come. Minutes passed as no one moved or said a word, the most anyone had done was breath loudly if not whisper amongst each other...

The scholar took this as a sign to take a chance. "If I may my lord, may I speak?" She held her silence as the leader of the Shado-Pan turned to regard her before continuing. "As far as we know the child has no knowledge of what had happened to him within the day of his birth, all we know regarding his own knowledge of the subject was that he has been on the receiving end of much wanton aggression. He has no innate desire to cause harm onto others beyond anything greater than a childish prank and has no reason to within Pandaria, I suggest that we give him a home here in a region which would ensure his safety as well as others."

"Bah!" All eyes turned to an armor pandaren whom all but stormed up the steps. "What happens in the event that your idea is false? We have enough threats as it is within our land between the mantid, the mogu, and the hozen ravages much like the one the Jade Forest is experiencing right now! As I understood it he had to be saved during his first week on our shores from such an incident!"

"Mind your-!" a swift hand from Taran Zhu stopped a Shado-Pan escort in both his advance as well as his demand.

"And what is it that you would suggest?" the Shado-Master queried calmly as he level a stern gazeon the apparent warrior.

"Even rats fight when cornered, it's a base instinct within all things. In his fear I hold no doubt of him using the power of the creature held within him to defend himself, yet who is to say he would retain his own mind while using such power? I ask for his death, plain and simple; what else could effectively prevent such a potential disaster?"

"It's barbaric!" the woman countered vehemently.

"Now hold on!" Another scholar, a male of their kind in robes similar to his female counterpart yet with blue for the main coloring with a red trim and a monocle place upon one eye. "My lord, if I may?" A nod was all that was given. "With respect to our... companions here, I offer a middle path: Banishment! He is not our concern nor will he be one if we have him set sail to live amongst his people-"

"He isn't from the human kingdoms," his counterpart interject much to the scholar's masked annoyance.

"Be that as it may," he continued, "We would effectively be ridding ourselves of a danger as well as preserving a life from further harm... at least on our parts."

"And if we were to suddenly tell him he has been banished for something he isn't aware of, how do you suppose he would react?" the white robed scholar suddenly argued.

"He'll panic, that's what!" the warrior joined in as he rounded on the blue robed scholar.

"Enough!" Once more Taran Zhu commanded the attention of all with a raised hand to accentuate his order. Slowly he let it go as he focused his gaze upon the pool once more for a moment before regarding the three at his sides till his attention finally settled on the scholarly woman in their mist. "He will live within the township of Honeydew Village under the watchful eye of the Shado-Pan," he spoke with finality before turning away, marching towards the very portal that gave him entrance alongside the company of his escort.

"I will see to it then that the arrangements are made then, my lord!" the scholar called out to the retreating lord of the Shado-Pan. It took a great deal of self restraint not to smirk at her dejected colleague and the agitated warrior near here.

XVX

Xi Shou's home, seven-forty-nine p.m.

"Gah!" Naruto clutched his hand as his recently made sparring dummy just won out in another punching match.

Xi Shou, the Pandaren who saved Naruto from a horde of Hozen after unintentionally knocking the boy out with a outstretched jug hanging out from a staff resting on the man's shoulder, was originally a farmer of tea leaves. Over the years he had taken a shine to martial arts to fend off hozen raids on his fields when their families or other means of getting their resources were either too large or insufficient respectively, and on occasion virmin when they numbers somehow enabled them to venture so far into the jungles. Normally, and thankfully, the wildlife, and quite often angry hozen, often ended their reign of terror before it could truly begin. But as time passed and he learned more and more and he had taken a shine to other things, namely the outside world amongst others. The chief reason he hadn't left the island yet was to master the basics of the most common class of Pandaren to ever leave and come back alive: The monk path of the Brewmaster. Though actually crafting drinks wasn't a requirement, it was a favorite past time, aside from drinking said brews, of people who went along this path.

Subsequently, he was staying behind to learn how to craft potent brews himself; if he was going to undoubtedly suffer hardship, he wasn't going to suffer while sober! A motto often found amongst dwarvern culture oddly enough.

As a consequence of a half minded mistake, he couldn't stay away his home for long periods of time yet when he planted a new crop of leaves; his one solace was he had yet to make a brew he could confidently carry with him as he traveled. Then Naruto came along...

The Pandaren had yet to be spotted in the northern half of the Jade Forest since last week, a personal record. The boy was slightly miffed by that, but it was outstandingly better than his time in Konoha. So far the only real complaint the child had was the same reason Xi learned to fight, hozen rids. A problem often solved with the help of a shovel and the occasional militia patrol. It was almost amazing how 'brave' they are when a child they briefly tormented came around with a weapon.

Naruto glowered at the training dummy. The hozen weren't the reason for its construction unlike Xi Shou's reasoning to learning how to fight. When Naruto observed the Pandaren monks he couldn't help but wonder to himself, "Would my life be better if I can defend myself?"

At least he was less likely to be chased by smaller groups.

Sighing, he looked up at the sky and frown as the last vestiges of sunlight were now giving away to the night. As he headed inside he gave his dummy one more glancing blow, wincing slightly at the impact, and picked up a shovel lest he forgotten where it by the time he came outside again.

"Just another day," he half sighed to himself as he walked into his current abode and locked the door behind him.

**A/N: Similar save for one or two events...**

**Monkeybandit2, making off with your attention! No refunds. **


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